Table of Contents
- What Determines Better Quality in Real Estate Photography?
- Why Would You Want to Enhance an Image?
- How to Enhance a Photo in Photoshop (5 Techniques)
- Step-by-Step Editing Workflow for Real Estate Photos
- Let PhotoUp Help You Edit Your Real Estate Photography
High-quality, professional photos are essential in real estate to attract potential buyers, highlight property features, and convey the value of a home or property.
Enhancing photos in Photoshop can help real estate photographers create visually appealing images that capture the essence of a property.
In this guide, we’ll explore what determines better photo quality, why you would want to enhance an image, and cover several Photoshop techniques for enhancing photo quality.
Let’s get started!
What Determines Better Quality in Real Estate Photography?
Photo quality is determined by several factors, each playing a key role in how professional and captivating the final image will appear.
These factors include:
Resolution
A higher resolution means more pixels and sharper details.
In real estate photography, higher resolution allows for clear images that reveal even the smallest property details, which is essential for potential buyers evaluating homes online
Exposure and Brightness
Correct exposure ensures that a photo isn’t too dark or too bright.
Proper exposure is crucial for showing properties accurately, as dark images can look uninviting, while overexposed ones may lose important details
Color Accuracy and Balance
Accurate colors help create a realistic look and feel.
In real estate, colors should reflect the property’s true tones, creating an inviting atmosphere that’s both natural and vibrant
Perspective and Composition
Good perspective allows rooms to look balanced and spacious, while poor perspective (caused by angles and lenses) can distort the space, making rooms appear smaller or oddly shaped.
Correcting this helps align vertical and horizontal lines, giving photos a professional look.
Why Would You Want to Enhance an Image?
Enhancing real estate images can help the property look its best and boost its market appeal.
In fact, homes featuring professionally edited photos receive 47% higher asking prices per square foot, which is a big boost in sales revenue.
Photoshop’s tools can turn a dull or flat-looking image into one that is bright, clear, and true to life, making it more attractive to viewers.
Here are some reasons why image enhancement is essential:
- Creating a Positive First Impression: First impressions are often made online, so high-quality photos make an immediate impact and can attract more viewers. A recent study revealed that 83% of buyers think pictures are very important in helping them choose which homes they will visit
- Highlighting Property Features: Image enhancement allows you to bring out the best features of a property, such as bright rooms, polished finishes, and beautiful views
- Conveying Professionalism: Clear, professional images are crucial in real estate marketing and branding, as they show potential buyers and sellers that a photographer takes their craft seriously. In other words, it’ll help boost your brand
In summary, 32% of homes with high-quality photographs sell faster than those without visuals, so ensuring your photos are of top quality is crucial to sell listings fast and at a high price.
How to Enhance a Photo in Photoshop (5 Techniques)
With these positive aspects of image enhancement in mind, let’s take a look at 5 powerful Photoshop techniques that can help you perfect your real estate photography.
1. Enhancing Image Quality
If a photo appears pixelated or lacks detail, you may need to enhance its resolution. To do this in Photoshop:
- Go to Image > Image Size.
- Increase the resolution in the dialog box that appears (e.g., from 72 to 300 pixels per inch for print quality).
- Use Preserve Details or Bicubic Smoother as your resampling option to minimize quality loss.
While this doesn’t add new detail, it smooths out existing pixels and prepares the image for adjustments without losing quality.
Higher resolution is particularly useful for large-format photos, like those used in online listings or printed materials.
For more details, check out our video tutorial on how to adjust image quality in Photoshop:
2. Brightness and Exposure Correction
Adjusting brightness and exposure helps achieve a balanced light across the image, crucial for making spaces look welcoming and spacious.
In Photoshop:
- Go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast to adjust the overall light levels
- Alternatively, use Exposure for more precise control, where you can adjust Exposure, Offset, and Gamma Correction
This video tutorial walks you through how to brighten a photo in Photoshop:
3. Color Correction
Photos can often have color casts due to artificial lighting or incorrect camera settings, affecting the atmosphere of a room. To correct colors:
- Open the Camera Raw Filter or use Image > Adjustments > Color Balance
- Adjust Temperature and Tint sliders to achieve a natural look. Warmer tones can make spaces look inviting, while cooler tones may work better for modern aesthetics
- For more detailed control, use Curves or Selective Color to target specific color ranges. This can help neutralize any color cast, ensuring colors reflect their true, realistic shades
This is particularly important in real estate photography, where color accuracy matters to give viewers a genuine feel for the property.
For more information, you can visit our guide on how to color correct in Photoshop.
Have You Ever Thought To
Outsource Photo Editing?
Try it today with 10 free edits from three professional photo editors.
4. Reduce Noise and Sharpen Details
Noise often shows up in photos taken with high ISO settings, particularly in low-light environments.
This effect looks like a spread of hazy specks that reduces the photo’s sharpness and overall quality, making otherwise beautiful shots appear grainy and less appealing.
Minimizing noise enhances clarity while sharpening brings out finer details.
To reduce noise:
- In Photoshop, go to the “Filter” menu and select Noise > Reduce Noise
- Apply sharpening carefully to emphasize textures like countertops, tiles, or other surfaces
To learn more, check out our video tutorial on how to reduce noise in Lightroom and Photoshop:
Additionally, this video tutorial walks you through how to sharpen an image in Photoshop:
5. Perspective Correction
Perspective correction is essential to maintain natural and professional compositions, especially in architectural and interior photography.
For instance, a photo taken at an angle might make walls or windows look slanted.
Corrected perspective creates a natural sense of depth and balance, allowing potential buyers to understand room dimensions and layouts accurately.
Here’s how to fix this:
- Use perspective correction tools in software like Lightroom or Photoshop
- Align vertical and horizontal lines, which is especially crucial for interior images to achieve a balanced look
To see how to align verticals, you can check out our video tutorial on how to straighten verticals in Photoshop:
And that’s it! You’ve now learned 5 techniques on how to enhance a photo in Photoshop.
To make your editing process even easier, let’s also take a look at a step-by-step editing workflow for real estate photos.
Step-by-Step Editing Workflow for Real Estate Photos
An efficient workflow can simplify the process and enhance photo quality effectively.
Here’s a suggested step-by-step approach:
- Start With Image Resolution/Quality: Set a high resolution to maintain quality
- Adjust Brightness and Exposure: Use Camera Raw or Brightness/Contrast to balance light
- Apply Color Corrections: Correct color casts to reflect realistic tones
- Reduce Noise and Improve Sharpness: Make adjustments to reduce noise and improve sharpness
- Correct Perspective: Align lines and angles to give photos a professional look
Final Thoughts
Enhancing real estate photos in Photoshop transforms images, highlighting property features in a way that is inviting and realistic.
Whether you’re correcting colors, fine-tuning exposure, or adjusting perspective, Photoshop offers a range of tools to make each photo stand out.
By presenting high-quality, polished images, real estate photographers can attract more attention to listings, convey professionalism, and ultimately help properties sell faster.
Have You Ever Thought To
Outsource Photo Editing?
Try it today with 10 free edits from three professional photo editors.
Let PhotoUp Help You Edit Your Real Estate Photography
Are you overwhelmed by the workload? Investing in a professional real estate photo editing service can make a huge difference.
By outsourcing your photo editing, you can free up valuable time for other high-impact tasks that drive business growth.
And as the saying goes, time is money—so you stand to save a significant amount!
PhotoUp is a leading real estate photo editing company with over ten years of experience and a team of hundreds of editors based in the Philippines and the US.
Our skilled editors can help you with the following issues:
- Brightness and color correction
- Vertical lines adjustments
- Advanced object removal
- Day-to-dusk conversion and Twilight editing
- Lawn greening and sky replacements
- HDR editing
- Manual blending
- Flambient editing
- And much more!
We can handle any type of editing from small to large bulk orders for affordable prices.
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Real Estate Photo Editors
Ready-to-hire editors for real estate photo editing, and more.
But that’s not all…
PhotoUp Offers More Than Just Editing
PhotoUp offers so much more than just editing. We are a complete one-stop-shop for real estate marketing services and also provide powerful tools such as:
- Virtual staging
- Virtual house tours
- Video editing
- Single property websites
- Real estate photographer websites
- Property flyers
- Floor plans
- House portraits
- And Virtual Assistants
You can find everything you need to enhance and market real estate photography in one user-friendly software.
How to Get Started
Getting started with PhotoUp is super easy.
All you need to do is sign up for a free PhotoUp account, and you’ll get access to our easy-to-use photo management system where you can upload and receive photos, send instructions, and download your beautifully edited images.
In addition, our software also allows you to track and manage team members and clients, store final images, and more.
PhotoUp Real Estate Photo Editing Uploader Demo
To see how easy it is to get started with PhotoUp, have a look at our real estate photo editing uploader demo:
It’s really that easy to get beautifully edited images returned to you in less than 24 hours!
So what are you waiting for?
Sign up for a free PhotoUp account today and let PhotoUp’s professional real estate photo editors take your editing off your plate!
Best of all, when you sign up for an account, you’ll receive a bonus of 10 free credits to use however you please.
We hope this guide helped you learn how to enhance a photo in Photoshop. Before you go, you may also want to check out the following resources:
